Enjoy your stay below the radar

The Fog of Cryptowar - Why it’s not about crypto regulation. Over the last two years, politicians in the USA, UK and elsewhere have been threatening the regulation of strong cryptography. But the experts and journalists who have expressed concern over this have done so in ways that we consider misleading. In this document we will recap the motives and strategies of the people who wish to regulate cryptography, the responses by its defenders and the battle over public opinion.

Due to requests by our readers we will start investigating and analyzing the latest darknet market takedowns. This can take a while since data is still coming in and nothing definitive is known.
Stay tuned.

On Oct 2nd 2013, a person was arrested in San Francisco (CA USA) who allegedly operated the darknet marketplace website “The Silk Road”. Shortly after, the Silk Road went offline.

Within minutes discussions on the Internet sprung up with thousands of people trying to cope with their loss, trying to make sense of what happened. Several “official” documents (a criminal complaint and an indictment) were released shortly after which, in turn, lead to commentators rushing to explain what stupid mistakes DPR – the Silk Road operator – had committed. Now, after a few days have passed, I’d like to give analysis a try myself.

Over the last few days our incoming gateways have been the target of a DDoS attack.However, we remain reachable anyways via the Tor and I2P darknets:
Tor:shadow7jnzxjkvpz.onion (or via shadow7jnzxjkvpz.tor2web.org if you have no Tor installed).
I2P:
jme44x4m5k3ikzwk3sopi6huyp5qsqzr27plno2ds65cl4nv2b4a.b32.i2p
(or via jme44x4m5k3ikzwk3sopi6huyp5qsqzr27plno2ds65cl4nv2b4a.b32.i2p.in if you don’t have I2P yourself).
alternatively:
shadowlife.i2p (or shadowlife.i2p.us or shadowlife.i2p.in or shadowlife.i2p.to if you do not have I2P running)

In this article we are going to explore how anonymity in the physical world is eroded through technologies and conventions that have been introduced over the last 30 years. Most people assume that their physical behavior is mostly disconnected from the world of bits and bytes, databases and surveillance (see part I on the Theory of Anonymity, and part II about Online Anonymity). Sadly, this increasingly proves to be an illusion.